Lavallee `living the absolute dream' after Jays confirm he will manage C's
North Delta's Brent Lavallee lost a dream job managing the Vancouver Canadians in 2020 to a COVID -19 shutdown and then was left wondering if he'd get another crack at guiding Nat Bailey Stadium's side when all of minor-league baseball went through a remake before last season.
That opportunity is coming after all. On Monday, the Toronto Blue Jays named Lavallee, 35, the skipper of their High A West League farm team in Vancouver for the 2022 campaign.
The C's play an exhibition game against the UBC Thunderbirds on April 6 at The Nat. Vancouver opens its 132-game regular season April 8, visiting the Spokane Indians as part of a three-game set. Their home opener is April 19, when they begin a six-game series at The Nat against the Eugene Emeralds.
That will mark the C's first regular-season game at the venerable ballpark since Aug. 31, 2019. There were no minor-league games at any level anywhere in 2020, and Vancouver played its home games last season out of Hillsboro, Ore., with Donnie Murphy as manager.
The Jays hired Lavallee in December 2019 out of Louisiana State University Shreveport, where he had spent 15 years as a player, assistant coach and then head coach. He managed the Jays' Florida Complex League team last summer.
“I grew up going to games at Nat Bailey,” Lavallee said from the Jays' spring training complex in Dunedin, Fla., earlier this week. “I'm looking forward to my first game this season when there's sunset. I'm looking forward to my first warm summer night when there are fireworks after the game. I'm looking forward to my first packed house.
“I know what the team means to the city, I know what the stadium means to the city. I couldn't be happier for the city to get its team back and it's a really cool situation being a part of it coming back. “I'm living an absolute dream.” Lavallee, who's a North Delta Jays alum like Justin Morneau, Jeff Francis and James Paxton, was named manager of the C's the first time around in January 2020. The minor-league season never started. By June, it was called off for good.
Word was already leaking out by then that Major League Baseball wanted drastic changes to the minors going forward. They were looking to streamline development, they said. MLB also wound up chopping overhead, cutting ties with 43 minor-league clubs and leaving big-league teams with just four full-season affiliates apiece in the process.
MLB messaging for months had been that they wanted those affiliations to be regionally based, and that led to speculation that the C's and the Jays were bound to cut ties, ending a working relationship that dated to 2011. There were even reports of Vancouver possibly pairing up with the Oakland Athletics.
The Jays and the C's did wind up sticking together, announcing a 10-year deal in December. Once that happened, Lavallee had “hope that I could be back up there” to manage the C's.
Guiding a team in his hometown will have its own set of challenges, the married father of two acknowledges. Family and friends could be at the ballpark daily. Lavallee says that “time management and organization will need to be at the forefront.”
He does maintain he's better prepared now to manage at the pro level than he would have been if he stepped in with the C's in 2020 like he was supposed to right out of university, thanks to spending last summer in the Florida Complex League.
“As much as it hurt at the moment,” he said of losing that first season in Vancouver to COVID, “I've gotten some time to learn how to coach pro players as opposed to college ones. I know more what to expect.”
Lavallee and his C's charges will continue working out in Dunedin until arriving here April 4. They'll get a couple of practice days in before playing UBC, and that contest does have special meaning for Lavallee. The Thunderbirds, like his old LSU Shreveport team, play in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), and he always hoped to put his team up against UBC in an NAIA World Series game. They never went to the national tournament in the same year, though.
He's a fan of Terry McKaig, the longtime UBC head coach, and of Chris Pritchett, who succeeded McKaig at the team's helm in 2015.
“What they've been able to accomplish there is impressive,” he said.